We're heading down a road where large numbers of cars will be powered by batteries in the future. Aside from the cost of batteries (dropping fast), the main reason for consumers to hesitate about jumping into an electric vehicle (EV) in the next few years, is range anxiety. We are not suddenly going to develop cars with batteries in them which will cover 500 miles on a charge, so how are we going to cover longer distance journeys?

The auto industry is (sensibly) proposing a solution which meets the average driver's needs about 95% of the time. You'll be able to drop the kids at school, get to work, and then home again via the shops all on one overnight charge, which you'll do either at or outside your home. But for road trips and non-average commuters, a host of new partner firms (and industries) claim to have a solution to the range problem. Best know of these is BetterPlace - who are developing an electric car charging network in several countries, and who will provide roadside swap stations in Israel and Japan within a couple of years, where you drive in and a depleted battery will be swapped - within two minutes - for a fully charged one.

But there's another solution which falls between the standard eight hour overnight charge, and the battery swap solution. It's known as the "fast charge" and it's a term which is being bandied about with increasing frippery. We've seen a section of the emerging EV industry (both start ups and established auto OEMs) change their tune about this. Back in 2007, no one had an answer to the problem of how to juice up the car's battery quickly if you ran out while on the go. Yet just two years later, here's the stock answer:

It’s been a long time coming, but be in no doubt that the electric vehicle (EV) revolution is finally upon us. What makes us so sure? We’ve seen Ford’s first EV coming down a production line, and actually driven it on public roads.

While
GM has long stolen headlines in the US with its Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid,
cross-town rival Ford now looks set to beat it to market with a humble Transit van.
It might not be Aptera-sexy, but its impact on the environment – especially in
cities – could be in a different league to the trailblazers currently in the market, like Tesla.

Whereas
most car drivers still worry about the range limitations inherent to electric vehicles,
with a van or small truck – where daily routes tend to be predictable, and well
under 100 miles a day in urban settings, ‘range anxiety’ for the driver
practically disappears. Ford’s move to make its first mass-market electric
vehicle a van, therefore seems smart – especially as many will go into big
fleets, where operators can closely monitor vehicles and provide detailed feedback
on the performance of what is still quite new technology.

First Ford Transit Connect BEV (here as Tourneo - a crew version) for the US, on the ramps in Smith factory

The
Transit Connect BEV as Ford calls it, goes on sale in North America in 2010, but the first vehicles to hit American shores are rolling down a production line right now
- in a factory in North-East England, where they’re built by Smith Electric
Vehicles. Earlier this week, Smith’s Dan Jenkins showed us the first Ford
Transit Tourneo Connect BEV on the production line floor, which you can see in this video below:

Smith
has a long history of building electric vehicles, with a number of big-brand
customers in Europe such as Sainsbury’s (supermarket), TNT (deliveries), and TK
Maxx (retail) already using its vehicles in their fleets. They’ve been converting Ford
vans for some years, so the official partnership between Smith and Ford that
was announced last year – which will ultimately see electric Transits being
built in a factory in Kansas City, seems logical.

The
real proof of the pudding is in the eating though, and having seen the first production vehicle on the factory floor (see video above), we then got to drive Smith’s demonstrator
prototype, fresh from a tour where it was shown to
people like Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. As you’ll see in our
video (below), from the back seat, the feeling of traveling at 50 miles per hour in a
vehicle with no engine noise, feels more than “a little star trek”. But the
real story is that, from behind the wheel, the Transit Connect BEV drives just
like a regular car or van, only one that’s much simpler to operate, and much quieter on the move. We've driven the future, and it's electric:

Check out more videos from the day we spent with Smith on our Blip TV channel - and watch this space for more blogs and videos on this subject, which we're following very closely. All Movement Design Bureau material is available for republication under a Sharealike Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Disclosure - Ford is sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's design and research work in 2009 - however we have an independent brief and say what we think. If you disagree, we want to hear from you. Thanks to all at Smith - and especially Dan Jenkins - for giving up their time to show us round the factory.

The film Objectified takes a behind-the-scenes looks at the everyday objects that dominate our lives – providing rarely seen insight and interviews with the people who brought them in to the world. The film is a primer. It’s the sort of thing that every would-be designer and student should watch before embarking on a career in the profession – because although it’s wrapped in a rich layer of cinematic lovely-ness, it also hints at the sheer blood, sweat and compromise that sits behind every industrially designed product that surrounds us today.

Sitting and listening to relatively secretive people – like Jonathan Ive at Apple, talk about their products, and their own design philosophy is enjoyable whether you’re in the profession, or simply an interested observer – the products provide a lynch pin around which everyone can engage.

Objectified didn’t start life as a book, but one suspects that from the research and interviews conducted here, and on the video cutting-room floor, lies a much more interesting, in depth piece that would make a cracking book. Indeed, anyone already working in the profession may find a good book on design (I recommend Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions) a more insightful way to spend time and learn new things. This isn’t to say that the film is without merits, merely that the viewer is left wanting to find out more.

The first half of the film is largely concerned with the way things come into being, and what actually represents good design. It’s the sort of information that most are probably already aware of – designer’s sketching, thinking, prototyping, the mass production process. It’s quite compelling to watch – because it’s filmed in a sweet way and the designers provide good sound bites – but doesn’t really tell us anything new.

Above: a trailer for Objectified

Where the film gets both more interesting, but also more frustrating, is in its second half. Here it moves away from the basic building blocks of design, and on to some of the issues facing the world today. As one might expect, sustainability is brought up – and one gets a profound sense from guys like the founders of IDEO of how the issue has come from nowhere, to be top priority, within just a few decades. The most pertinent comment that stemmed from this was a question about how designers might challenge an oft-unmentioned fundamental behind design, which involves building obsolescence into products in order to create more and more crap, which the ten percent of the world’s population who already have way too much crap already, will go out and buy. It was pleasing that this led into a discussion about designing things that improve with age, and discussion of cradle-to-cradle design processes.

Yet I say the film frustrates, because points like this aren’t explored in enough depth. Perhaps this is the design nerd talking, but if we’re considering the future of the design of things, then the critical issues were only scratched at, without ever penetrating below the surface.

The perspective on how digital interaction and the microchip has the power to change the form of products – but how it doesn’t appear to be doing so in many cases (cameras as the example) – was thought provoking. Chris Bangle once again talked about the importance of the product as a personal avatar – asking the question of what the generation growing up today truly wants from its products. He wondered out loud as to whether it would be a service-based function, or a form-based desire.

I kept trying to work out who the film was aimed at. Its makers appear to be trying to walk a fine line between appealing to a mass, non-designer audience, and providing brain food for those already in the profession. By a hair’s width they get away with it, because overall it’s an appealing watch, and to a designer, much of what goes unsaid here is the interesting, thought-provoking part.

The burning issue is not simply how designers use their skills to make the world a better place (which is what everyone sets out to do, right?). But how they actually break out from within the secretive walls of the studio, to go and really see and understand what’s happening in real people’s lives in the real world, involving them in the design process along the way. At present, certain design disciplines (I’m looking especially at you, automotive world) do this extremely badly. As one of the designers in the film suggested, sometimes the most innovative, clever designs, aren’t designed at all. They’re just elegant, impromptu solutions that someone with no formal training has created to solve a specific problem. Objectified reminds us that we would all do well to remember that.

Joseph Simpson watched Objectifed at The Barbican Cinema in London on 26th May 2009 - you can find out where more showings will be taking place, around the World, at the Objectified website, here.

Fleet vehicle buyers can spend the time to understand the bottom line benefits - environmental and financial - for making the electric vehicle switch in a way that ordinary car buyers cannot always do, making fleet buyers able to switch to new electric vehicle options more easily than ordinary car drivers.

Our new project - Electric Delivery - seeks to understand the commercial electric vehicle market in real detail: over the next six months we will talk to vehicle manufacturers, fleet managers, drivers, customers, and everybody else involved in making real electric vehicles work.

That's for tomorrow. Electric Deliveryis about documenting the progress of the working electric vehicle today. White vans first.

See more of The Movement Design Bureau's coverage of future transport, strategy and vehicles - including several in depth interviews and analysis with Ford's top sustainability and design people, here.

Honda's Insight left the official Movement Design Bureau parking space (alright, the road outside the office) just over a week ago now, so having produced this light-hearted video review towards the end of its time with us, we've now had the chance to think about the car a little longer. Our lasting impression? A total bag of contradictions.

The Insight is at once both deeply impressive and yet slightly disappointing. Why? In short, because Honda has managed to wrap apparently smart, up-to-the-minute technology in a package that's both easy to live with, fine to drive and affordable for the average c-segment (think Golf, Focus) car buyer. Yet at the same time, that technology failed to deliver real world results in our hands, and out of a town environment, the Insight feels out of its depth - leaving us questioning the point of that slippery, low-drag 'kamm-tail' shape and the packaging compromises it has created elsewhere in the car.

We're going to explore some of the innovative thinking behind the Insight, and Honda's overall future strategy in a forthcoming blog, which will feature the interview we did with Honda UK's head of environment and government affairs - John Kingston - while we had the Insight.

But for now, we felt it worth delving a little bit more into the design and detail of the Insight - because this is an area which has raised much interest among others. Or to put it more bluntly, the fact that people think it looks like a Prius has raised plenty of eyebrows. So here are some key thoughts, details and features of the Insight in full on, close up technicolour...

Pretty? Not really, but hardly repulsive either. That high, chopped-off tail, and steeply sloping rear roofline combine to create what's known as a 'kamm-tail'. Invented (discovered?) by German design-engineer, Wunibald Kamm, it reduces the air turbulence thrown off the back of the car at speeds - which in turn reduces aerodynamic drag.

The key contributing factor to people saying that the Insight looks like a Prius is the silhouette and side profile of the glass house. This becomes particularly evident when you see the upper part of the car in isolation, as in the picture above, but some of the detail resolution...

Roland Barthes suggested that cars were the modern day equivalent of Gothic Cathedrals, “the Supreme creation of an era. Conceived with passion by unknown artists”. That's still true to this day. While fashion designers and architects have become household names and outright superstars, car designers are little known, often lost in the cloak of their brand’s identity. Of all the names that the average non-car nerd may have heard of, three are most likely to stand out: Patrick le Quement, Chris Bangle, and J Mays. So with le Quement retiring after 22 years as head of Renault design, and Bangle recently leaving BMW under unclear circumstances, this leaves Mays as arguably the most publicly recognisable car designer in the world right now.

Calm and unassuming in person, you’d never know that Mays was responsible for the design direction of (and for the hundreds of designers behind) Ford’s various brands and nameplates. Up until recently of course, this not only included Ford, Lincoln and Mercury - but Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover and Aston Martin too. This led Mays to describe his job as being “about a mile wide and an inch deep.” But with PAG disbanded, and Volvo about to follow Jag, LR and Aston out of the Ford stable door, Mays seems pleased that his job is becoming “an inch wide and a mile deep.”

Clearly, he’s got more time to focus on making Ford’s core products stellar once again (recent cars such as the Flex and Taurus suggest this is already happening), along with giving under-nourished Lincoln and Mercury some love too. It’s the Lincoln C concept – unveiled at Detroit’s NAIAS in January 2009 - that we were primarily in town to talk to him about. Yet while that car is well worth a closer look, it’s the bigger issues facing the car industry and the world of car design that we really wanted his views on.

The Lincoln C Concept in Ford's product development studio

So here, Mays - the man behind VW's famous Concept One and Audi's influential Avus – who now also acts as Ford’s Chief Creative Officer, gives his views on a whole host of design subjects. From why the computer is today’s hotrod, to how he believes Ford is leading the way in user research, and why the skill-set of tomorrow’s car designer might need to be quite different to that of today’s.

As Ford moves forwards with its ‘One Ford’ strategy, it’s likely that many of the things you see from the brand will have been touched by the hand of Mays. So watch the video at the top of the article, to get an insight into how the future of the blue oval might look…

Full transcript follows, link to full unedited interview at bottom of the transcript>>

Proving financial slumps really do put a spanner in the workings of even the greatest, best-prepared talents, Toyota's today announced net revenues for the year to March fell by 21.9 per cent, versus last year. All the figures are here in this morning's press release.

Toyota sold 7.57 million vehicles in the fiscal year 2009 (to March 31st). That's 1.34 million less than in the year before - about a 15 per cent fall.

The company's accelerating its "profit improvement activities" by expanding its hybrid line-up. The new Prius is ready this month (handy) and there's a Lexus HS250h this summer too. The firm will launch four hybrids in Japan and three overseas within the year.

The results statement emphasises a plan to "thoroughly analyze our customers needs in each region". It also stresses product development focused on "hybrid and compact vehicles with more cost reduction efforts". We've been driving Honda's new Insight - aka Prius competitor - last week and it's designed to be cheaper than the Prius (see our verdict here). So this is no surprise.

Toyota's also emphasising "resource-rich and developing countries", a reminder that the growth and big car sales opportunities remain in markets where people expect their lives to improve in the near term - obvious perhaps, but it really can't be understated just how miserable most richer country markets are right now. Selling cars to depressed markets involves selling cars to depressed people. It's not fun and not easy.

The statement goes on to say that "In addition, we will continue to accelerate commercialization of next-generation technologies in the areas of environment, energy and safety including hybrids, plug-in hybrids, next-generation batteries, bio fuels and fuel cell vehicles. We also aim to establish flexible and effective systems in the areas of development, production and sales to respond to changes in business environment."

While the rest is predictable, the last point intrigues me - "establish flexible and effective systems in the areas of development, production and sales to respond to changes in business environment".

This is something we've talked about before - firms like Toyota today can only have a profitable direct relationship with people who walk into showrooms and sign up to 'own' their cars. That narrows the firm's market substantially. Young people especially often don't crave a car as their primary, full-time 'social vehicle' now. They can get an iPhone a lot cheaper and interact far more using it than they can using a car. Toyota's Scion brand wasn't the answer here - the only way to tackle this is by getting really critical about the dealer-sales-based model that overwhelms (and shackles) today's 'development, production and sales' system. The brutal reality is that today's market is changing faster than even Toyota can.

Last Thursday we interviewed Ford's Sue Cischke about the company's sustainability strategy. Then on Saturday we met design students in the DAAP (Department of Design, Architecture, Art & Planning) at The University of Cincinnati(UC). Two of those students - Amy Johannigman and Robb Hunter, now follow Dan Sturgesand Drew Smith in giving their views on what Sue said, and what Ford should do next. Over to Amy and Robb...

Sue has a great base of conversation. We loved that she dropped the “T” bomb (TRAIN!) right at the beginning. Her knowledge of Ford’s current sustainable facts and figures proved her credibility. The mention of a “Hub Concept” got us hopeful that Ford has big plans in this space.

But while she seems to be developing some models for Ford’s future, we would like the shape of these models to reflect more progressive shifts. Peter Drucker reminds us that "wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision".

We’ve three key points, and have represented each one graphically. We call them “Shapes for Sue”. The ideas they contain are explained in the text below each diagram.

1. Be a Game Changer

At a recent Designer’s Accord meeting in NYC, Allan Chochinov of Core77 said "we know too much not to design in a sustainable manner”. He’s right. The facts are in, and climate change has created a situation that is in urgent need of addressing. Sue's talk of "transitional changes" will not suffice, when one considers the magnitude of our problem. We need bold actions and strict practices from industry leaders.

We need to impress behavioral change within users to set firm attitudes and outcomes. Ford has the opportunity to be a "Game Changer" as P&G’s A.G. Lafley would say, and implement large scale shifts. Traditional business models would see Sue's prescribed strategy of "near-term, midterm, and long-term" solutions as smart. But these are strategies for a previous era - comfortable change rather than radical rebirth. If Ford claims to be an industry leader, it needs to step up, and differentiate itself as such. The danger is that the world is now changing much faster than Ford.

2. Mash-ups not Mix-tapes

Mash-ups are a current, popular form of music created by taking parts of many existing songs and overlapping, restructuring, and recreating them into an entirely new compilation. A mash-up creates a song from familiar parts but creates an entire new way of hearing it. Artist Greg Gillis (aka GirlTalk), may mix Pras's "Ghetto Superstar" and Yo La Tengo's "Autumn Sweater" all in less than 30 seconds. We think Ford should see this as an inspiration and analogy for creating industry partnerships. Currently, Ford’s partnerships feel more like a mix-tape, a mix of single tracks from different albums on one tape. Most of Sue’s discussion paints Ford as merely a hardware maker. Ford needs to reach out and begin partnerships that embrace service design, infrastructure change, mobile urban living. The possibilities are endless when we are open to creative, collaborative, non-traditional forms of ourselves.

3. Co-Creation

Sue spoke of Ford’s interest in current thought leaders and Industry conferences. It seems to be talking with many of the industry's tastemakers to make more informed decisions. The fact that Ford has created positions for sustainable strategy and social media are impressive in themselves. Yet while creating all these new positions and discussions, Ford seems to have forgotten the primary rule of ‘sales’: be a good listener. Ford’s product development models a collaborative inner-circle of new-age hybrid leadership. This model resembles a funnel and seems to focus more on "a perception’s game" as Scott Monty describes in a January 12, MDB interview than a receptive open-source model.

Traditional leadership models will not meet the pressing needs of our current economy, and climate change. We propose a co-creation model similar to the work of academic design researcher Liz Sanders, in her "Make-Tools" workshops. The idea of co-creation is not design by democracy, but rather design by listening. The advent of social media penetrates today's participatory culture in completely new ways - ones that are highly digestible by the public.

So come on Ford, let's cut the jargon, turn up our tweets and begin a real dialogue. One that's devoid of traditional marketing and watered down plans.

Amy Johannigman and Robb Hunter are both currently undergraduate students in the Department of Design,
Architecture, Art and Planning at The University of Cincinnati. Amy
majors in Product Design and has worked at The Ford Motor Company among
others, while Robb majors in Transportation Design and has worked at
Hasbro toys, DEKA and Intrago.

Both bring a multi-disciplinary approach to what they do - favouring collaborative processes over demarcated disciplines.

On Thursday we interviewed Ford's Sue Cischke about the company's sustainability strategy and put the interview online. Now we're gathering comment from key thinkers we know. First up was Dan Sturges, next comes Drew Smith, currently based in Germany working as a freelance design strategist for an automotive design strategy consultancy. He also runs the downsideupdesign blog. Over to Drew...

By way of introduction, during a live interview last night at the Fortune Brainstorm: GREEN conference, Bill Ford went on record saying “One thing I’ll tell you for sure: our ability to forecast has been just horrible.” He added that despite bringing in external advisors to help forecast three-to-five year market developments, the company “might as well have just tossed darts” given their lack of success in defining the future of the Ford. Apart from demonstrating a, frankly, shockingly short term view on Ford’s future, one other thing occurred to me: Ford is talking to the wrong people.

Comfort zone

Against this background, I was, in some measure, pleasantly surprised by what Sue presented in the interview. It showed that the company is at least cognisant of some of the longer-term (i.e more than five year) mobility issues that the company will increasingly be party to.

Sadly, however, there was little to quell my fear that there’s not much in the way of a strategic approach to defining a sustainable role for Ford as part of an sustainable mobility future.

Furthermore, evidence abounded that old-school business thinking continues to reign supreme in Dearborn. From choosing to partner with an oil company, BP, in devising future vehicle strategy because “...they know... the fuel side of the business, we know... the vehicle side of the business” to continuing to interface with the old guard of the business development networks, there’s a sense that Ford is sticking, largely, to it’s comfort zone.

Yet Sue goes on to say that it’s going to “...take a different mindset” for America to make the transition to smaller, more efficient cars and, in the longer term, to alternative modes of mobility. She never communicated, however, how a change in mindset, either Ford’s or America’s, might come about.

Sowing the seeds of change

The cultural climate, to my mind, has never been better for sowing the seeds of substantial change in the way societies relate to mobility. It’s clear, based on Bill’s comments and this interview, that if Ford wants to participate in, and profit from this moment, they need to start talking to a different group of advisors. Now.

From an American perspective, issues surrounding energy independence, environmental degradation and the collapse of the credit markets (with the resultant modification of consumer values), provide the right environment for a visionary car company to take the lead in presenting an alternative, more sustainable transport future. Importantly, the American political leadership is in a responsive, supportive frame of mind too.

"I can’t help thinking that Ford would do well to stop seeing themselves simply as a
producer of cars and more as an active component in a sustainable
mobility future."

Creating a vision, taking it public

Imagine the possibilities if Ford sat down with the real thought leaders in sustainability (I include in this group anthropologists, designers, design strategists and urban planners among others) and developed a wide-ranging, flexible series of options for sustainable mobility in urban and suburban areas. Then, through a document/movie/multimedia extravaganza (Scott Monty could define the form), picture Ford taking this vision to the public.

On the one hand, the event would act as the touch point for opening up grass-roots community discussion about how we would like our lives to be lived in relation to cars and the urban environment.

More importantly the discussions would provide feedback and an opportunity for in-depth study of how the culture surrounding mobility is changing at the end-user level on a local scale.

It’s not as if the idea of going public with a broad vision of the future is unprecedented in the car industry. The GM Motoramas that ran from ’49 to ’61 sold an entire nation of eager consumers the idea of expressing themselves through how they moved from place to place. Ford could do the same to usher in a new age of sustainable mobility and, as a bonus, get themselves truly back in touch with the consumer, a vital relationship that the Big Three have squandered over the last 30 years.

For Ford to attain global relevance as a mobility provider, and for their products to dovetail elegantly with local transport infrastructures, the company needs to provide solutions that are at least regionally and, ideally, locally appropriate, assembled close to their final destination. This is a concept that Gordon Murray is already working towards with his T25 small car.

Ford: Think beyond the product, think entire ecosystem

Needless to say, this shift towards system thinking is risky for Ford because, as Sue said “..systems aren’t our core business, cars are”. But systems, beyond computer and OS, weren’t Apple’s core business either. Yet from the introduction of the iPod in 2001, via the opening of the iTunes Music Store in 2003 to becoming the world’s most popular online music and movie store, Apple transitioned from simply selling a product to providing the entire, highly profitable ecosystem.

At one point during the interview, Sue talks about the shift in environmental discourse from a binary, “black and white” approach to a more nuanced, “middle ground” view. I can’t help thinking that Ford would do well to undergo a similar shift in their thinking so that they stop seeing themselves simply as a producer of cars and more as an active component in a sustainable mobility future.

Drew lives in Frankfurt, Germany but originally hails from Australia. He holds a degree in Industrial Design from The University of Technology in Sydney, and a Masters Degree in Automotive Design from Coventry University - one of the world's premier automotive design colleges. He was recently named as one of Design Droplets top 10 industrial designers to follow on twitter. You can check out his profile here.

I spent a (very) long day on Tuesday at the 2009 auto salon in Geneva. Setting out to see all the major new unveils and concept cars was a tough job, but hey, someone had to do it! The key aim of the day was to try and gauge the mood of an auto industry which is currently up against the wall in face of a global recession and plummeting sales.

While the show floor was packed with new models and concepts, there was little from the industry to suggest it had the answers to its current issues. Instead, there was a mildly defiant air of 'business as usual', but a sense it might be slowly sinking in among some that 'business as usual' might not work for very much longer. It can be hard to try and take in everything at a show as big as Geneva, whether you're on the show floor or sitting behind a computer watching the world's automotive sites fight to get pictures up first. So, as an experiment, for the last half hour of press day one, I ran around the floor shooting footage and providing commentary on (almost) all of the important launches (sorry Opel, I know the Ampera's important, but it does so little for me (visually) that I forgot to film it!).

The videos are split into three, and each lasts ten minutes or less. If you weren't on the show floor earlier this week, then hopefully they give you a sense of what it was like to be there.

The first video features Infiniti, Hyundai, Ferrari, Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley and VW:

The second covers a bit more of VW, Nissan, Honda, Fisker, Dacia and Toyota:

And the third and final one covers Kia, Alfa, Ford, Aston, Magna Steyr, BMW, Mercedes and Rolls Royce - before me rounding off with a few thoughts and feelings from the show:

Check back later for more from Geneva, and as ever, if you were there, have thoughts, agree or disagree, or have a question on anything here, do leave a comment or drop me a line.